Quantitative air risk assessment for a drone inspection mission along fast-train lines

The availability of large-scale air traffic data, including aircraft operating at very low levels, opens new possibilities for a quantitative evaluation of the risk of midair collisions for drones, esp. in beyond visual line-of-sight operations. The contribution of this paper boils down to a threefold evaluation of such a risk using the reference qualitative approach, the Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA), and two quantitative approaches inspired from the literature. Quantitative assessment makes the most of the data collected through cooperative technologies such as ADS-B and FLARM by estimating distributions and indicators from real data instead of using generic assumptions. In the following, we perform risk analyses of a realistic drone inspection mission along fast-train lines, and show how the quantitative analysis of the air risk could help to determine when such a mission could be executed in conformance with the existing framework of SORA.